It’s time to start treating carrier services as a public utility, similar to transportation, water and electricity. Large corporations expect that, like a public utility, their communications transport will be always on and always available to users. To get this degree of service, they pay for private line or fiber connectivity. At most two carriers – an incumbent local exchange carrier and interexchange carrier – supply a single service, and testing is largely automated. End users take guaranteed redundancy and sufficient capacity for granted as part of the carrier service offering and the company’s internal infrastructure.
The same is not true in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) and small office/home office (SOHO). In these environments, carrier switched services, which are only sometimes on and sometimes available, comprise the majority of voice and data connectivity. In this world, three or more carriers – ILEC, ISP, IXC or competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) – can provide one service. Cost is lower, as is the quality and availability of service.
Most businesses are not large companies; they’re SMBs and SOHOs. These users get ulcers every day with respect to service quality and availability. The main problem is the age and documentation level of the existing wire-line plant within the ILEC and customer premises, which makes wire replacement and repair a time-consuming nightmare. The second problem is the lack of remote automated test tools that would help solve inter-carrier finger-pointing problems. A third problem is slow user response time caused by over-subscription or limited trunk capacity. More carrier problems involving customer provisioning, complaint resolution and escalation procedures are rampant.
When confronting carriers with these problems, we’re apt to be told “You get what you pay for.” I can’t imagine receiving such a response from a public power company. The world of computing is rushing headlong into on-demand services. The world of data communications, on the other hand, is limping into the world of shared use.
Almost all public utilities are regulated and serve the public good, as well as earn profits for their shareholders. Carriers are regulated only with respect to data transport, not services, and traditional switched voice services. In data communications industry parlance, a “service” is a VPN, DSL, Internet access, e-mail, managed customer premises equipment and, in the future, IP voice. There’s the rub. SMB and the SOHO customers are constantly looking for ways to decrease costs, increase throughput and outsource more responsibility to the carrier. The carrier is looking for ways to sell additional profitable services in a competitive marketplace. The carrier has carte blanche to offer as much or as little as necessary to meet minimum availability, quality or support requirements. This maintains high profit levels for services at the expense of customer satisfaction.
The solution to these problems is limited regulation of carrier communications services. The ILECs would receive all rights of ownership, including “pass through” wholesale pricing of local loop and premises copper. In return, the ILECs would document and make available for review all wire-line use and availability, and upgrade the plant to meet automated repair, capacity and sparing needs.
Mandatory carrier levels for quality, availability and support, along with common escalation, coordination and outage compensation procedures on a service-by-service basis, would need to be set and monitored. Finally, in order to promote competition and avoid predatory marketing practices, services would become infrastructure independent as layered options available from the ILEC, CLEC, IXC or ISP over commodity transport.
Something must be done soon to create a public utility for communications services. If not, the profit-driven vision of an interconnected and productive virtual community of consumers and businesses using utility-based, on-demand resources will never come to pass in the U.S.
